


Love's a Hand Me Down Brew

by Maple_Fay



Series: Tumblr reposts [1]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, F/M, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 13:44:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4022068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maple_Fay/pseuds/Maple_Fay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU gift-fic based on two prompts, in which our favourite characters start out as two definitely NOT nice people. At least not to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love's a Hand Me Down Brew

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lodessa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/gifts).



> I was requested to write an ‘AU assholes prompt’ story, and this thing kind of wrote itself (and made my hand cramp, since I’d written most of it in pencil during a local breakfast fair, hyped on Brasilian coffee).  
> The title is from Ella Fitzgerald’s Black Coffee. The prompts I used were as follows:
> 
> 1) "I’m a barista and you’re the obnoxious customer who comes through and orders a venti macchiato while talking on the phone the whole time so I misspell your name in increasingly creative ways every day" AU.  
> 2) "I’m a busy businessperson and my barista keeps misspelling my name in increasingly disrespectful ways, honestly, who does this person think they are" AU.
> 
> Enjoy!

**_love’s a hand me down brew_ **

“I’m really sorry, Chakotay. I’ll take a double shift next Tuesday, and—“

“Don’t worry about it, Lanna,” he interrupts her gently, looking around the room in frantic search for two matching socks. “I get it.”  _Or I would, had I ever been in a similar position._  “Take care of Miral, and give her a hug from me.”

He hears her let out a relieved sigh over the phone, and smiles a bit, the expression gone once he catches the sight of the mess his hair is in the hallway mirror. “You’re officially the best boss ever, Chakotay. I’ll let you know once it all blows over, alright?”

“Sure thing, kiddo. Stay safe.”

And this is, exactly, how he finds himself opening the shop at 5:30 AM on a wet, cloudy morning—despite the fact that he’s actually the  _manager_  of said shop, and should have people doing this who are not him. Just as his luck would have it.

He runs a cloth over the table surfaces—all pieces of furniture in the place are handmade, specifically: by himself—turns on the massive coffee machine and chats with the bakery delivery girl, the one that always gives him a particularly inviting smile. (Her name  _might_  be Seska, but Chakotay honestly can’t be bothered to remember. Women come and go—mostly go—girls he meets in pubs, first-time managers huddling to him at marketing events, an occasional late night customer; he doesn’t mourn them when they walk away, being much too busy fighting to keep Liberty Café out of the clutches of great enterprises and ensure his own freedom from corporate lifestyle.)

The first crowd of the day starts rushing in: early runners and students on their way to class at the far end of the campus, bleary-eyed and yawning—although some of the girls seem to wake up instantly once the realize it’s not Lanna who’s serving them this morning. It’s quite flattering to know he can still turn many a young girl’s head, even at 6:30 in the morning, and it instantly puts Chakotay in a good mood.

Which is why he doesn’t  _strangle_  the woman on the spot as she walks in through the door, grey-and-navy power-suit buttoned up all the way, high heels clicking resolutely on wooden floor. She looks rather nice—early forties, a natural redhead with sharply cut hair and that ultimate-power-businesswoman attitude that shows itself in the way she holds her chin resolutely high, and fires a never ending stream of instructions into her phone. She gets in line, phone still red hot in her hand, and Chakotay watches her out of the corner of his eye, looking strangely forward to that snappish, commanding voice losing some of its bite once she turns to him for her order.

As it turns out, he’s completely out of luck on this one. The woman doesn’t acknowledge him in any way other than to quickly pronounce, “Double espresso, hold the water; Janeway”, and goes right back to berating some unfortunate lackey on the other end of the line. Chakotay grinds his teeth together, puts the name (hasn’t she been  _christened_ , he wonders?) she’s given him on the cup, and prepares the coffee himself, letting young Harry handle the orders for a while. He makes sure the beverage is absolutely flawless, hot and strong and fragrant—in hope to at least get a smile when he passes the order over.

Again, he’s being hopelessly naïve. The woman grabs the cup with little more than a passing glance (her eyes are, as his wretched luck would have it, the most striking shade of blue), turns on her heel and marches resolutely out the door.

“What was  _that_  all about?” he mutters under his breath, hiding behind a puff of steam as he prepares a latte for the doe-eyed girl waiting patiently across the counter from him. Harry lets out a dry chuckle and hands him another fresh order.

“She’s always like this. Comes in at least twice a day, never speaks a word to anyone. Lanna has a thing or two to say about her—you don’t even want to know.”

“She should be taught some manners,” Chakotay grumbles, giving the girl her coffee with a wide, but slightly insincere smile. She blushes beet-red anyway, poor kid.

“Be my guest,” Harry snickers and closes the cash register with flourish. “ _I_  wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the manager, but…”

Chakotay rolls his eyes good-naturedly, putting the finishing touches on a cinnamon powder pattern.

 _Let her come again_ , he thinks, slightly surprised by his strong reaction to the woman.  _We’ll see who comes out of this on top._

_Wrong expression!_

–

True to Harry’s words, the redhead is back at lunchtime, the navy jacket lost and the top button of her pristine, high-collar blouse opened to show a hint of cleavage and the sharpness of her collarbones. The phone is, again, glued firmly to her ear, and there’s a line between her eyebrows that speaks volumes about anger and frustration. She walks right up to the counter—Chakotay’s on his own, having sent Harry out on a lunch break—and demands a ristretto, obviously on edge about something. Getting neither ‘please’ nor ‘thank you’ out of her puts  _him_  on edge, too: it’s not quite enough to make him spoil her drink (he can’t actually afford losing a regular customer), but this time he puts her name down as “Jane-away”.

Close enough, he thinks quite smugly, watching as she picks the cup up and leaves, never noticing anything.

He wonders whether he’ll ever see her again, and rolls his eyes at himself.

–

Lanna calls him in the evening, sounding breathless and quite excited as she explains that the one-off job her husband (pretty good programmer, pretty unsociable person) got has turned into a two-week gig, and would he hate her  _very_  much if she took the time off? He agrees on the spot—he can’t be paying her quite enough to support her family, so every time Tom gets in on a project Lanna drops out of her schedule at the shop, staying home and taking care of little Miral. Chakotay gives her quite a lot of leeway on this, but honestly: she’s one of his best people, and knows her way around every bloody machine they have, so it would be a real shame to let her go.

Which means that he’s stuck with covering her shifts for the foreseeable future—and, he realizes as he steps into a tepid shower the next morning, trying to wash exhaustion out from behind his eyes, dealing with ‘the Janeway woman’.

Sweet.

It turns out to be as irritating and bothersome as he suspected from the beginning. She comes in twice, maybe three times a day, always on the phone or texting furiously. She never makes eye contact, swiping her card angrily across the reader and leaving as soon as she’s handed her order. By day four, Chakotay starts to think she’s only coming in because it actually requires  _less_ focus than pushing a button on some machine. It makes him unreasonably angry: he’s got other customers he’d be better focusing his attention on, but his thoughts come unhelpfully back to her every other hour, even when he’s home and tries to relax, focusing on his craft.

He decides something needs to be done about this whole situation. He  _will_  have her notice him, and allow him to voice his displeasure. He contemplates talking to her, but dismisses the idea instantly—she probably wouldn’t even notice him speak.

So he goes back to the tactics he’s employed once before: deliberately misspelling her name.

He mostly  sticks with ‘Jane-away’, interspersed with ‘Jetlagay’ on the mornings she looks particularly unfocused and out-of-this-world, as if she’s just traveled around the world in a day. Still no reaction, unless you count his growing impatience and irritation. He also contemplates ‘Mockingjay’, but Harry tells him the word is actually considered quite cool by contemporary teenagers—something to do with a book, or maybe a movie; he forgets—so the idea gets written right off the board.

He wants to wait out for about two weeks before upping the ante, but breaks down a few days before the deadline, on a late afternoon when she’s especially snappy, despite having had two espressos already. Gritting his teeth, he writes ‘Jackaway’ on her cup, unimpressed with himself but very,  _very_  angry.

She takes the proffered cup, turns to go, takes a step: and pauses mid-move, studying the label. She turns back to Chakotay, very slowly, and puts the cup down on the customers’ side of the counter. Chakotay holds his breath, putting the final touches on a hazelnut-flavored latte he’s preparing for yet another (or perhaps the same?) doe-eyed student.

“I want to speak to the manager,” the Janeway woman demands, looking him in the eye for the first time ever, head raised up slightly despite the killer height of her heels. She really  _is_  tiny.

“Of course,” he answers pleasantly, flashes a grin at the blushing student and looks back at Janeway, wiping his hands carefully in a cloth. She raises her eyebrows expectantly, and Chakotay thinks she looks like she has to physically restrain herself from tapping her foot on the floor. “ _Well_?” She stresses the word out, and he finally puts the cloth down with an exaggerated sigh.

“How can I be of service?” he asks in his best professional voice, and takes quite a bit of pleasure from the way she cringes a bit.

“ _You’re_  the manager?”

“I own the place,” he answers curtly, and nods towards the queue. “How can I help you? We’re sort of busy right now.”

She raises herself up to full height (an impressive move, but not  _quite_  an impressive outcome) and arches an eyebrow. “I was hoping you could tell me why you’ve been intentionally misspelling my name for the past week or so.”

“Eleven days,” he corrects her breezily, rearranging espresso glasses. “I honestly didn’t think you’d notice.”

“You didn’t think I’d…? It’s my  _name_ , for goodness sake!”

“Well,” he pulls a bunch of spoons out of a drawer and starts polishing them, rather aggressively, “you  _did_  seem completely focused on the beverage, and treated my staff and myself as if we were no better than vending machines. Machines have a tendency to break down.” He throws a spoon back into its drawer, making it clatter loudly, and meets her eyes in a hard, decisive look. This is it, he thinks—the moment she either yells at him, throws the cinnamon disposer at his head or calls the district manager demanding the shop be closed, effective immediately.

What he does  _not_  expect is for her to blush furiously and look down at her shoes, frowning. “I did, didn’t I?” she asks in a quiet, gentle voice. She bites her lip—which is  _adorable_ , and should probably be banned in several states to ensure people don’t fall over at her feet immediately after exposure to the gesture—and raises her eyes back up to his with a resigned sigh. “I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t mean much, but I really didn’t think…” She shakes her head and picks up her handbag, turning to go. “It was unfair to berate your job only because mine was in shambles. It won’t happen again. Excuse me.”

“Wait,” he calls out to her, desperate not to have the conversation end like this. She looks back at him, raising an eyebrow in question. He makes a decision on the spot, hoping he won’t regret it later. “Would you—would you like to talk about it, over coffee? It’s on the house,” he adds, flashing her his best smile, dimples at full power.

For a moment, he thinks she’s going to refuse and leave—but in the end, she nods and gives him a small, shaky smile. “Great,” he answers with yet another dazzling grin, working the dimples to his advantage. “My shift ends in ten. What can I get you? Another espresso?”

“Actually, I was thinking about something less—“ She pauses, but Chakotay thinks he can guess her meaning. Less  _strict_. Less  _sterile_. He gets a cup from the shelf, pen hovering over the tag as he watches her intently. “My name is Kathryn,” she says, and adds easily, “please.”

–

He joins her at a corner table a few minutes later, bringing a cup of oriental-spiced americano with a drop of milk and honey. “So—what is it that you do, Kathryn?” he asks with genuine interest, and sits back to let her talk.

She tells him how she started out as an IT developer ‘ages’ ago, but exchanged the job for a managerial one after being encouraged to do so by one of her mentors—the same man who’s been keeping her at arm’s reach from an executive position for the past seven years, despite  her vast experience and first rate qualifications. She tells him about a secretary who’d only been with the company for a few months now, but has already been promoted to a junior manager, most likely thanks to her stunning looks and the ‘support’ of one of the ‘big guns’—and how it makes her feel angry and restless, now that she’s pushing forty-five and her career has been stagnating forever. How her right-hand man was sent off to ‘spy’ on their competition about two weeks before, and how difficult it’s been on her without his support.

“—which is by no means an excuse to act the way I did,” she concludes with a tired sigh. “And I really am sorry about it.”

“It’s alright,” he says: and, surprisingly, means it. She smiles back at him—something she definitely ought to be doing more often—and wraps her hands around the empty cup. “What about you? Which god of fortune did you piss off to end up doing morning shifts at your own café?”

So he tells her about Lanna and her husband, and how they struggle to make ends meet. Kathryn listens intently, completely focused on the story, and hums appreciatively. “I need to come to you for a crash course in soft skills,” she remarks bitterly, making him chuckle.

“And I probably need to pick up some of your decisiveness.”

“Are you suggesting we might both benefit from staying in touch?” There’s a definite spark in her eyes, and Chakotay nods eagerly, almost in spite of himself. “Here,” Kathryn pushes her business card across the table to him, “have your barista’s husband call me. I might use a freelancer with his skills. That might even take you off the early shifts.”

“Ah, but then I’d stop seeing you,” he counters, hoping that his dark complexion hides his blush. “Can’t say it appeals to me all that much.”

Kathryn doesn’t have the advantage of a darker skin tone, and he thinks the blush looks particularly lovely on her. “You’ll still get to see me in the afternoons.”

“That may not be enough. I’ve still got a lot of ideas for misspelling your last name.”

“Have I made a tactical mistake by letting you know my  _first_  name?” She sighs with fake dramatism, pauses and smiles, looking too smug for her own good.  “Fortunately, I don’t think there’s much that could be done with ‘Kathryn.’”

His answering grin is even wider. “You just give me some time, and we’ll see.”

–

As it turns out, she’s right—he ends up calling her Kathryn, just Kathryn, until he switches to something else entirely, accompanied by a possessive pronoun. He still gets to play around with ‘Janeway’ for a bit, though, which is all very well—but then she changes her last name: and  _that_ , Chakotay thinks as he serves her the first espresso of the day in their sun-streaked kitchen, is absolutely  _the best. Thing. Ever._

**_/end_ **


End file.
